What is a coffee grinder? And what is an espresso grinder? Are they really any different at all?
These and more questions are sure to pop into your head whenever you’re thinking of buying your first coffee grinder.
Believe it or not, this is one of my favorite topics to discuss.
Coffee grinders are an extremely important part of making good coffee at home; a high-end espresso machine will never be as good as it could be if you don’t have a grinder. It is, essentially, a waste of money.
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So let’s start by answering the first two questions:
What is a Coffee Grinder?
Also called burr grinders, coffee grinders work by having two discs rotate in opposite directions.
When the beans pass through the small opening between them they will be ground into a powder. This is exactly how milling works and how flour is made.
The amount of space between these two discs or burrs determines whether you will have fine grind or coarse grind—the smaller the space, the finer the grind.
But it’s also very important to know what is not a coffee grinder —and that would be blade grinders.
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Blade grinders
Blade grinders are sometimes also. marketed as “coffee grinders”, which they aren’t.
Blade grinders have blades instead of burrs.
They are a lot like blenders or food processors, which is useful for mincing and all other sorts of uses.
But for coffee?
No.
There’s no way of adjusting the grind size, which is the main problem here: you are at the mercy of the grinder.
Grind too long, you get a powder.
Which isn’t even a consistent powder, but full of bigger chunks—this always results in off tastes in coffee.
Don’t get me wrong: blade grinders are very useful in the kitchen. Just… not for coffee.
The Marketing of Blade Grinders and the Birth of the “Espresso Grinder”
The thing about coffee grinders is that they’re really big machines.
A lot of advances have gone into making them smaller and quieter, but at the start of the century, they were not the type of machine you’d want in your kitchen: huge, heavy, and noisy.
In short, they were thought of as something that only inhabited coffee shops and not the home.
Blade grinders were there to fill a void: small, portable and, more importantly, cheap.
While a good grinder for home use can set you back 100-400 dollars or even 1000 for a professional one, blade grinders cost just tens of dollars.
Enter the Espresso Grinder
And we didn’t know better back then.
To us, a grinder was a grinder.
And thus blade grinders enjoyed quite a few years of popularity with coffee lovers. We were fooled.
How?
Well they made us believe it by calling it a coffee grinder, and by calling actual coffee grinders espresso grinders.
They made it so blade grinders were coffee grinders too.
And, at the time, people were so desperate for a solution that we bought it. We believed it when they told us it was also a coffee grinder—only that it couldn’t make espresso.
And back then, home espresso wasn’t as big as it is today, so that wasn’t a problem.
Conclusion
Espresso grinders and coffee grinders turned out to be the exact same thing.
A marketing ploy to get us to buy suboptimal blade grinders created the term “espresso grinder”, which hadn’t existed before the 2000s.
Today, we know that coffee grinders need to have burrs, which is the correct method for grinding coffee.
Although you could also do it by hand, with pestle and mortar, just like they do traditionally in place like Ethiopia.
Photo by Lucas
